292 comments and yet no one have asked what I thought was the obvious question. Why AUS ( or specific part of AUS ) dont built battery grid and store those energy for the cheap instead?
Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
301–310 of 317 posts
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
if we didn't transition through the horrible days of CFLs first. since we did, that's a big knock against
Don't knock CFLs. We still have the very first 2 we brought back in 1985, 13W Philips Prismatics. Been in continuous use, both outdoors under a portico. Still going strong.
Efficiency- and longevity-wise, pretty good.
They're fragile as heck, though, and contain mercury (albeit a small quantity in a relatively less-harmful form). Breakage needs to be handled appropriately, and disposal is as hazardous waste.
LEDs are more efficient, offer better (and often more flexible) light quality, are damndably rugged, and have far less toxic material load. Given the balance, I'd be swapping out CFLs (and have been).
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind. The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink. See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara). Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Ve…
High density -> large populations.
Density, generally, makes service provision easier.
Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.
Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.
This isn't going to happen simply because it would introduce enormous strategic vulnerabilities. The first act ina war would be to sever an opponent's grid connections to their neighbors because that would massively erode their ability to maintain an orderly civil society.
We've lived in a geopolitical world since Britain converted its navy from coal to oil prior to WWI, making itself dependent on Middle East oil (the UK didn't realise its North Sea reserves until the 1960s, they weren't developed until the 1970s/80s, contributing hugely to the Thatcher boom). Choke-points of oil exporters (particularly Iran, OPEC), pipelines (TAPLINE), canals (Suez, Panama, etc.), straits (Hormouz, Malacca, etc.) have all been at the centre of global geopolitics for well over a century.
Solar changes the who and where, but really not the what significantly. Solar is far more distributed and less concentrated, and options for distribution are potentially more diverse (cables, direct power beaming, synfuel production and distribution) in ways that an oil-based economy hasn't been.
Even within national borders, power production and distribution are sufficiently centralised and choke-pointed that they are vulnerable to significant disruption, even by non-targeted accidents and natural disasters. Major national and regional power outages are not especially frequent, but neither are they unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages>.
During periods of conflict, national and irregular forces routinely target power infrastructure, with significant but rarely absolutely crippling effect. For the past three-and-some years, two major eastern-European adversaries have been directly targeting one anothers' energy infrastructure. Though the results are costly, neither has been bombed back to the stone age, or even the pre-electrical era:
"Resilience Under Fire: How Ukraine’s Energy Sector is Adapting – and What It Means for Europe"
https://rasmussenglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/REPOR...> (PDF)
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's assuming the worst possible interpretation of what they were saying. I think you should assume good faith
Slavery is being used to make solar panels. Claiming that is a net good is a rationalization of slavery. That's as good as the faith gets. The ends don't justify the means.
At this point I am struggling to maintain the assumption of good faith. As I’ve said throughout, slavery is bad. That doesn’t change the fact that cheap solar panels are good and will save millions of lives. I have never said that the latter justifies the former, that’s something you invented.
I would suggest a more nuanced understanding that not everything fits into a binary good/bad mentality, especially when talking about decisions made by many people. Even individuals often have decidedly varied track records - Watson is in the news this week, and while his later racism and sexism don’t cancel out his scientific career, you have to know about both to understand how flawed people can still make large accomplishments (repeat for Shockley or Millikan, etc.). Recognizing the conflict helps you understand the whole situation, without detracting from your ability to say certain parts of the story are unambiguously bad.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#306So just to fantasize for a bit, Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely. Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free? Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail? I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say…
By the time we get fusion (say 5 years) the solar+battery solution will be so cheap that it will be preferable to grid electricity (free to produce, expensive to transmit).
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff That's pretty rough. That should be about 14¢ per kWh which only a hair less than the median price per kWh in the US (~17¢).
Yeah - unfortunately the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Almost all households are on fixed tariffs, typically about 26p/kwh at the moment.
FWIW, here's a chart showing current prices across developed countries, showing UK is worst!
https://fullfact.org/economy/uk-world-electricity-prices/
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future Snowy? https://theconversation.com/white-elephant-hardly-snowy-2-0-... Snowy aside, households are installing 40kWh batteries now. Add 2 cars V2G that give you an additional 40kWh with impacting the car battery life overly. Across the 12 million Australia houses that adds something of the order of 1 terawatt hours of storage to the grid.…
Snowy 2.0 isn’t an electricity generator, it’s pumped hydro. It relies on electricity being generated elsewhere. The governments plan is bait and switch. Make it seem lucrative at the start, and then squeeze everyone who committed on better terms by ratcheting up the fees and ratcheting down the feed-in tariffs. Alternatively, we could have built a handful of big combined cycle gas plants, close to the retiring coal…
Further to my comment about:
In October 2025, the scheme was reported to be 67% complete but it could not be completed within the A$12 billion forecast cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Power...
6 years, incomplete, expected to cost well over six times the initial estimate if it ever gets completed.
Expect Snow 2.0 to a big impact on electricity prices in Australia. Upwards. We’ll have to most expensive pumped hydro in the world. What an achievement!
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slavery is being used to make solar panels. Claiming that is a net good is a rationalization of slavery. That's as good as the faith gets. The ends don't justify the means.
At this point I am struggling to maintain the assumption of good faith. As I’ve said throughout, slavery is bad. That doesn’t change the fact that cheap solar panels are good and will save millions of lives. I have never said that the latter justifies the former, that’s something you invented. I would suggest a more nuanced understanding that not everything fits into a binary good/bad mentality, especially when talki…
> At this point I am struggling to maintain the assumption of good faith.
You began your comments by calling me a creationist. You never had good faith to begin with.
> I would suggest a more nuanced understanding
There is nothing nuanced or subtle here. This is not complex.
We're talking specifically about solar panels. Slave labour is being used to produce those solar panels. You're trying to make the case that's somehow a net good. That's ugly.
Your position is not defensible. I doubt you read anything I linked to.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from Sweden and hearing those energy prices really caught me off guard. With taxes and fees we pay ~€0.1 per kWh on average. I have stopped caring about when house hold appliances run, our main energy consumers are heating (during the cold months) and charging the electric car.
€0.1 is about AU$0.18 That’s about what our electricity used to cost. Back before we locked ourselves in to wind and solar, and gas peaker plants, and a massive pumped hydro project that will approximate never be finished. Sweden’s energy mix is predominantly nuclear, oil, and hydro. Wind and solar account for 10% and 1% respective. There’s no escaping the fact everything wind and solar go electricity prices go up. D…
> In Australia, since 2005 wind and solar have increased to about 11% and 17% of electricity generation respectively.
> And that time period correlates perfectly with the just over 100-200% increase in electricity prices, depending on where you live.
I'll say this one thing and get out of the way. The price shock began in 2022[1] (see figure 1). The rise in energy costs aren't due to solar and wind generation, which is the cheapest there is. It's due to the transmission and variability of intermittent renewable energy, and also sensitive to export prices of gas due to our weak policy on gas reserves. Batteries are the answer to that as they can store when its cheap and dispatch to the grid when it isn't (and that includes home batteries). The Neoen battery which you mentioned, was the world's first big battery. It's been wildly profitable, which is basically driving the market to invest more in grid scale batteries and less in large scale renewables. So the federal and state governments aren't picking a winner by backing batteries, these policies are just accelerating us towards a cheaper grid using the momentum that's already there in the market. The federal government is also trying to offset the ending of the state-level bill relief for those that can't afford batteries, and reducing grid pressure/prices in the evening when everyone gets home.
[1] https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/spot-market-prices...